WHERE SHOULD YOUR WEB PAGE BE HOSTED??
A lot of ISP’s offer a ‘free’ web personal web page with your Internet access package, these are considered by the ISP host to be for your personal web page e.g. “Sam’s web page” etc., they are not business pages. If you have a small business or are a professional it may seem like a good idea to locate your page in this space, after all you are getting it free right? For many business individuals this may be just what they need. However there are several things you need to consider before you decide to stake your business to a personal web page.
Free page space that comes with your internet access is considered by the ISP to be ‘personal glorification space’. They don't expect that anyone much will want to come and look at your page, that is why the space is free. Most ISP’s only allow for a certain visitor count - known as a hit rate - to a personal page. A larger hit rate will choke up their lines and they don't like that, it's not what you are paying for.
If you use a personal page space to promote your business and begin to get more visitors you could well run into trouble with your ISP. They will soon notice the greater activity on their lines and may come after you. This could be as dramatic as cutting off your page altogether and/or demanding that you pay business rates for the space since your traffic is high.
Check with your ISP before you decide to use your personal space. If you don't expect that you will get any if many visitors after your page is up, there is no problem - but then why are you creating a web page at all?
If your ISP cuts off your page you will have to relocate to a different provider or pay for new space on your current provider. Whatever choice you make it is unlikely that the address will remain the same, so all the promotional advertising etc. that you have done for your web page will need to be changed. If your ISP cuts you off there will be no nice referral page, just a ‘file not found’ error when someone tries to access where your page was.
Personal pages are listed as such by the ISP. They are usually in a special directory which is not searched by the search engines when their spider arrives at the site. There are tools that can be used to tell search engine spiders what is located in which directories and which ones they should look in and which to stay out of. Personal pages are usually listed as such so search engines do not bother with them. Some search engines have special spiders for personal pages but these are then listed in the personal web page section to aid people in finding other people.
If you are using this space for your business, you will not be picked up by search engines, or if you are you will be in the ‘personal’ section which is not what you want. People looking for your business or services will not be able to find you through internet tools. Even if you pay a company to add you to the search engine you may not be added when the search spider hits the personal directory signals at the ISP site.
Most personal pages - and a lot of down domain sites - on ISP’s have no security in place. This means that even the most inexperienced hacker can roll in and steal or change the contents of your site. ISP’s do not consider it important to offer security to personal pages, and quite often it's left wide open on private domains that are rented to customers.
If you have such a site try this simple test. If you have a directory beneath your main page so your site reference looks something like - "http://www.mysite.com/aboutus/ouroffice.html"
‘aboutus’ is a directory in which the page ‘ouroffice’ resides. Go up to this listing in the location field and delete everything after the ‘aboutus’ and press the enter key.
If you get a screen saying ‘forbidden’ or ‘no access’ your ISP has done some work securing your server. If you get a list of all the files in your directory, change your ISP now! Your site is wide open.
It's a lot harder to do a simple check on a personal page since they don't usually have more than one directory, but if you have you can try this too.
Most ISP’s do not spend as much time as they should ensuring that pages are safe. Even if they have plugged up the big holes like the one listed above there are still dozens of smaller holes that hackers can get through. In fact
hackers can get in almost anywhere that is not locked down tight on the other side of a firewall. However your page cannot be on the other side of a firewall or it's not accessible to the internet, so it’s always in danger.
This means that the wonderful site that you have had created for you and you think looks so nice may not actually be out there at all. Some hacker may have come in and overwritten your page with something they think is far better, and you are bound to think is much much worse.
Few if any ISP’s check the integrity of your site to ensure that what you put out there is what is really out there. This applies to especially to personal pages, but those with their own domains are not safe either. Don't even bother to ask about this problem if you have personal page space. If you are renting your own domain you might want to talk to your ISP.
The problem obviously hits more high profile pages more often than unknowns. The White House page, is especially prone to attacks by hackers. To alleviate this problem the web site staff have created a duplicate of the site behind a secure firewall and every few minutes they copy the contents of the secure site to the internet site. In this way any hacker work is at least short lived.
You might not be a high profile site, but you only need one person with the knowledge and a dislike of your company or one unhappy customer and this could happen to you!
Does your page continue to function? Do all the link work all the time, do you have any broken links which were missed or overlooked by the designer. It's easy to do if there are more than a couple of them, plus sometimes files get corrupted and just don't function any more. Does your ISP monitor your site for you and inform you if there are problems? In all cases of personal pages the answer is NO. In most cases with other ISP’s the answer is NO. Some will offer this service at a higher cost if you are lucky but mostly it's not available unless you own your own server and website staff or are paying a lot of money for your site to be maintained.
If you are using a personal page space, you can only have a static page. This means no interaction with your visitors. This might not matter to you at all, if all you want to do is tell people about your business and offer an address or phone number. However if you decide that you want to create a form to get feedback or collect a mailing list you are immediately in trouble.
Forms need interaction with the host server which means a CGI script at the ISP’s end. Most are not interested in providing these services since it means a lot of work on their part. You can create a mail to form which will send the contents of your form to your e-mail but not all browsers support mail to forms so some visitors will not be able to use your site. If you are interested in having a more interactive page you will need to find an ISP who will work with you.
Visual Encounters Inc. will design and create interactive forms and pages for you. Please call us to discuss your requirements. We will only host sites where we have written the server side CGI scripts we do not accept client written scripts.
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